Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young,

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Welcome to the first Colette Podcast of 2021.

I'm your host Jonathan Kay, delighted to be back with another year of podcast coverage of science, higher education,

culture, and all the other subjects we cover at quilette. If you're a listener but not yet a reader,

please drop by at quillet.com. In fact, today's guest, University of New Mexico social psychologist Tanya Reynolds, is one of the authors who made a big splash at Colette in 2020,

with her November 23rd article titled, Retracting a Controversial Paper

Won't Help Female Scientists. In that piece, Professor Reynolds described an ongoing controversy at the journal Nature Communications,

which had just published a peer-reviewed article by a team of authors led by Bedur Al Shebley, an assistant professor of computational

social science at New York University in Abu Dhabi.

In her Nature Communications article, Professor Al Shebley and her co-authors had examined a database

of more than 200 million scientific articles that had been co-authored by junior and senior

academics.

By comparing the number of citations each of those

articles received, Professor Al Shebley sought to determine the effect of

mentorship on academics with a particular focus on the question of whether the practice of pairing junior female academics with senior female academics paid career dividends.

...